Before the filling in of the Back Bay had made much progress, the city had no
other direction of expansion open except through the “Neck” that then was the
only land connection of the city. A hotel arose on the Neck at this period,
called the St. James. The name of James Street commemorates this old-time
hotel, while the park in front of the hotel became Franklin Square. In the
Seventies, this building was taken over by the New England Conservatory of
Music, then recently formed, as a building large enough for classes and
dormitories under the same roof. When the Conservatory moved to its present
location, the old building was taken over by the Y. M. C. A. It is now back in the
hotel business, as the Franklin Square House.

*

Boston’s South Station is the only railroad station containing two postal
stations, both directly accessible from the passenger concourse without going
outdoors.

*

Before so much filling
in was done on the banks of the Charles, Lechmere’s Point (now East Cambridge)
was a swampy point of land sticking out into the river on the Cambridge side.
As it was an isolated section of Middlesex, remote from the rest of the county,
it was a convenient landing point for the British military expedition which set
out from Boston to raid the rebels in Middlesex on the morning of
[Wednesday] April 19,
1775―and whose hurried retreat a few hours later started the Revolution. For
similar geographical reasons, the Middlesex courts, when driven out of Concord
in December, 1786, by the Says Rebellion, took refuge in Lechmere’s Point―and are still there.
The filling-in of the shore has obliterated the Point, but its name survives in
Lechmere Square and Lechmere Station.

*

The “station plaza”―a wide, open square
serving for entrance to a railroad depot―was originally a
Boston idea. Over a hundred years ago, both Park Square and Haymarket Square
arose in that way. Dewey Square at present serves the same purpose; and its
name indicates the time South Station was built.

*

At 175 Washington
Street (between Court Street and Alams Square) is a place that looks something
like a bank. It has a fancy Commonwealth shield on each window, and it carries
signs indicating that it is a State “liquidation” might be something dangerous
in some countries, here in Boston it only indicates the place where the State
handles the affairs of closed banks. The place used to be Paul Revere’s
goldsmith shop―where he also did some
miscellaneous engraving on the side. Among other things it was there that Paul
Revere engraved the first American paper money, issue by the “State of
Massachusetts Bay,” in the early days of the Revolution.

*

America’s first bank was in Boston, at the location of the present Rogers-Peet
store on Tremont Street. Originally a “bootleg” textile works, before the
Revolution, when English regulations prohibited all manufacturing in America,
the building then located at that place became known during the Revolution as
“Manufactory House.” Like most of these bootleg pre-Revolution industries in
Massachusetts, it was foreclosed by groups of creditors after the advent of the
Commonwealth in 1780, and these money groups established in “Manufactory House”
the first bank in America in 1784, the Massachusetts Bank. It became a storm
center of the Shays Rebellion in 1786, against which the rebellion was
directed. Some sixty years ago, this bank was merged into the First National
Bank.